Prepare to be gouged:
A PandoDaily journalist was the first to notice that Gogo's standard fare of $15 for the day (or $12.70 if you buy ahead of time) wasn't available on his Virgin America flight from San Francisco to New York, and instead cost $10 per hour.
"We've been experimenting with different pricing on the flights we've seen with heavier use, to make sure pricing keeps up with demand," a spokesperson for Gogo explained to me. "There's a limited amount of bandwidth on the plane, so we want to make sure the pricing reflects the demand on any given flight."
In other words, people are actually using in-flight Wi-Fi now — and there's enough demand, on certain flights, that Gogo can charge more. Low supply + high demand = higher prices.
Gogo basically has a monopoly on the service:
The problem with Gogo's prices stems from the fact each flight has a limited amount of bandwidth — about 3 megabits per second, or slower than what any smartphone made post-2008 is capable of — which it can't change. Back in 2006, Gogo (formerly Aircell) purchased the exclusive rights to the air-to-ground (ATG) spectrum from the FCC and FAA for $31.3 million. They were the first to get into the inflight Wi-Fi game, and because of this, no other service can touch the 150 skyward facing towers that Gogo has scattered across the country.
The Dish 